The pervasiveness of the Internet and the advancements in network speed have enabled a wide variety of different applications on storage devices. For example, cloud storage, or more specifically, network distributed data storage system, has become a popular approach for safekeeping data as well as making large amounts of data accessible to a variety of clients. As the use of cloud storage has grown, cloud service providers aim to address problems that are prominent in conventional file storage systems and methods, such as scalability, global accessibility, rapid deployment, user account management, and utilization data collection. In addition, the system's robustness must not be compromised while providing these functionalities.
Among different distributed data storage systems, an object storage system employs a storage architecture that manages data as objects, as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems which manage data as a file hierarchy, and block storage which manages data as blocks within sectors and tracks. Generally, object storage systems allow relatively inexpensive, scalable and self-healing retention of massive amounts of unstructured data. Object storage is used for diverse purposes such as storing photos and songs on the Internet, or files in online collaboration services.
There is a need for operators of storage systems to know how much data a user is storing in order to bill the user accordingly. Similarly, operators of network-based storage systems often need to know how much data was transferred in or out of the system. A multitude of factors must be accounted for when aggregating and reporting metrics used to cover these needs.